White Box Hangouts 4: The Hallowed Eve

I wrote a summary of Wednesday night's game but Paul C who plays Alvis the Mystic posted this to G+ in the style I used for previous write ups and it was better than mine so I stole it...

Not the Lord of Sorrows but suitable.

Paul wrote:

"Just played in another awesome session of the Grim North with monkiest2 as GM. Truly amazing adventure with cheese magic, choking mist, "teachers" looking for children,gloomy monolinths, a bard who is always right, a thief who can read lips, creepy children, dimensionally unstable demons, true love, a terrifying chase through the streets, a haunting spectre of a horseman and reaching HQ in the nick of time. All around class session of thrills and chills aplenty."

Some notes about the session:

Cheese magic. Tyromancy had been bandied about on G+ earlier in the day as useful piece of obsolete vocabulary, being a method of divination by reading signs in the coagulation of cheese. I liked it and immediately stole this as the means by which the Old Woman could introduce some lore about the various supernatural threats of the Feast of Hallowed Eve. Not least The Lord of Sorrows, who would arrive at midnight on his blood red horse to claim those still on the streets of the city, deemed to be given over to the realm of despair.

The Rolling of 3. During the Hallowed Eve the number three is sacred to The Lord of Sorrows. Anytime a three was rolled by any of the players on any die, he was drawn closer to the material realm. With most of the rolls in White Box being d20 and d6 there were quite a lot of natural threes rolled, eight in total. This resulted in the premature summoning of The Lord of Sorrows himself and the characters having to run for their very souls.

The tapping on the walls of reality. On the Hallowed Eve the walls of reality grow thin and horrors from the Outer Dark try to force their way into the world. This manifested as the sound on metal tapping on glass "Tap, tap, tap" which the PCs could hear every time things went quiet. Answering the tapping in kind, on a black marble monolith as it happened, resulted in a whispered voice saying "Let me in."

The Girl with No Eyes. Encountering a child with her eyes gouged out is just creepy, especially when she keeps disappearing. Her rag doll that the PCs were in possession of for a bit also had no eyes.

The battle. When Vayne the Bard invited the eldritch hordes of the Outer Dark to "Come on in" I rolled on the d6 random least demons table I had prepared for the game. They faced six floating ammonites with glowing green tentacles and black shells composed the twisted, fossilised, shrunken faces of the screaming dead. These were eventually defeated although Silent Silvie the Acrobat rolled appallingly, Vayne the Bard would have been horrifically injured if not for Alvis's mystic healing and Ram the Thief nearly died. Reduced to negative one hit points she was on her way out.
Vayne: "There must be some way I can stop her dying"
Me: "How exactly are you going to do that?" Knowing that there were no mechanical options open to the party.
Vayne: "True love's kiss."
Me: "Ha ok, I'll allow it." And so she did not die.

The session was planned around several independent supernatural threats which were then inexpertly interwoven with a simple fetch quest to recover some lost children in a park. I was pleased with how it turned out, good players making the game very enjoyable to run and they didn't even encounter the Tatterwitch and her pumpkin demon, any of the soul burned Black Magicians or the Cold Dead. Maybe next Hallowed Eve...